Those people won’t matter. Your loved ones do and will though, and they won’t measure you by your accomplishments and net worth.

I'm sure she was, but I did not personally know her and I'm pretty sure few others here did as well. It's newsworthy for what she was, her role, not really for who she was as a person.

I certainly wouldn't mind reading some personal eulogies about what a great mentor her was etc., or about how she influenced your life with her work even if you didn't know her.

But I also don't mind reading critical posts about the role she played, I think that's part of the picture for someone who's famous as a business leader. If people weren't willing to speak freely about the dead, we wouldn't have had the Nobel prizes.

This saying never made sense to me as a game is only a game if there are players.

She censored things because of politics. That’s not “lovely.”

YouTube has videos on the dangers of GMO crops, despite the scientific consensus for their safety and utility.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8959534/#cit000...

YouTube has plenty of videos about electromagnetic sensitivity about which the WHO says: “EHS has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure.”

https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-hea...

And more stupidity: “Eating these foods kills cancer”

https://youtu.be/WGbFnp56csg?si=t54Pcr3uqjrXRx9f

“12 foods that can fight and cure cancer”

https://youtu.be/FdlKCpEzSAE?si=J6rtKs6valWnamBP

Interview with Robert DeNiro 8 years about his concerns about vaccines and autism and his doubts about the vaccine effectiveness statistics.

https://youtu.be/FJ7iPn39i08?si=mRYD3a3y9HdMPMQ8

Covid censorship was political and not from some altruistic “goodness.”

And YouTube experienced very significant growth during the pandemic. So that “lovely” soul was profiting because of the lockdowns. Lockdowns that were possible due to fear and a lack of any permissible public debate — partially thanks to YouTube. Would lockdowns have ended sooner if there was more debate on the topic allowed? Definitely. What about school closures? Absolutely. But videos debating these things weren’t allowed.

So no, the game and the player in this case are one and the same. I’m not going to respect anyone that supported lockdowns or supported suppressing scientific debate. Curating opinion (and facts) while pretending to not to isn’t worthy of respect.

And, YouTube still allows those addictive kid videos where the narrator says “If you love your parents, like and subscribe. If you don’t love your parents, don’t like and subscribe.”

The people in this thread and elsewhere online are generally arguing that she was not a lovely soul.

I feel like there's an unwritten "recently" in there. If you were to speak ill of Colonel Sanders, nobody would berate you for speaking ill of the dead. But when a CEO like Wojcicki, who made changes that were unpopular to the end-users (but helped turn YouTube into an actual profitable company) dies, it's considered very impolite to use that opportunity to bad-mouth decisions she made. When her son died earlier this year, that would've been a bad time to speak ill of her, as well, even though she herself was still alive.

A better phrase may be "Don't say things that will hurt the feelings of those who are grieving," but that doesn't roll off the tongue so easily.

"We are defined by our deeds in life"

We are but most folks here basically know nothing of her deeds, or really anything about her. They see one piece of a thing she was a face of for some time period, and that they also knew mostly nothing about, but appear to love to have strong opinions on!

If you want to speak of her deeds then go and learn about them. Otherwise, people aren't speaking of anything other than some small myopic view of a human being they knew nothing about. Folks don't get to say that she is defined by the small piece of stuff they saw, just because they want to have an opinion on it.

Besides being disrespectful, it's not even interesting, and it says more about the people doing it than the person they are talking about.

It's like saying you are defined by the small and short interactions you had with grocery store cashiers who happen to like to post about their experiences with you on the internet and nothing else.

>But between unrelated people? Why can't I discuss the legacy of the dead? We are defined by our deeds in life. It is only natural that in death, people will talk and opine about what we have done. Nothing wrong with it.

unless you have a magical way to make your comment here invisible to her family and friends, posting it to the internet is not keeping the comment exclusively "between unrelated people." Many of those replies to Pichai are vile.

Agreed, I don't get it either. I also wonder how many people saying this sort of thing expressed the same sentiment when someone they had a strong dislike of passed or had a close brush with death.

We've had many such incidents over the recent years and at least in my anecdotal observations, people do not consistently apply this.

Socrates never wrote a single thing down and was, somewhat ironically, opposed to writing. The reason is that he felt that words cannot defend themselves. They can be twisted, taken out of context, and misrepresented, with none there to defend them, provide that missing context, or what not. Fortunately his student Plato disagreed so here we can discuss him 2400 years after his death.

With a dead person, I think this logic holds to an even higher degree. Personally I'm not really sure whether I agree or disagree with it, but it seems pretty reasonable, especially if we don't hyperbolically immediately leap to absurdly extreme examples like Hitler or whatever.

> Maybe I am a callous person, but I have never agreed to this "don't speak ill of the dead" thing.

If they're rich and powerful who cares... here's John Oliver's reaction to Kissinger dying [0]... tl;dr "not soon enough"

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HmrJmq7d1c

On a 1-10 scale of nefariousness, I would classify Youtube as pretty low, it's a manageable addiction and with a little bit of self control the videos you watch will be worthwhile. I am a subscriber. Then there is Youtube Kids, and whoever worked on that deserves a 9, and good bye.

Don't kill Chomsky, he is still alive